Free Republic

Tracking device reveals for the first time how eels migrate 4,500 miles from European waters to the mid-Atlantic Every November, when the Moon is at its darkest, there’s a stirring on riverbeds, lake bottoms and marshlands around Europe. Countless silver serpents respond to an ancient urge and turn towards faster-moving water, beginning a perilous, 4,500-mile journey down deep ocean trenches and across undersea mountain ranges. Anguilla anguilla elvers resting Until now nothing has been known about their incredible journey, only that the smallest larvae of the European eel are found in the mid-Atlantic Sargasso Sea. How the spawning adults get...

It may sound like a superstitious excuse for a poor day's swimming, but it is not uncommon for triathletes to complain that the water is behaving badly - even that it is "evil". Now a study suggests what they are feeling is real. Leo Maas, a fluid dynamicist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, and colleagues found that "dead water" - an obstructive effect encountered by ships at sea - can strike swimmers too. As ships sail over a layer of warm water sitting over saltier, or colder, layers, waves form in the boundary between the two layers....

"I think it's very important for our friends, the Israelis, to have a peaceful Palestinian state living on their border. And it's very important for the Palestinian people to have a peaceful, hopeful future." So spoke President Bush just two days after his re-election, just exactly as news reports were leaking Yasser Arafat's demise.The combination of Mr. Bush's stunning new mandate and Mr. Arafat's near-death condition will lead, I predict, to a quick revival of Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy after months of relative doldrums and to massive dangers to Israel.The doldrums will cease because the Bush administration views Mr. Arafat as the...